


Icarus

by starkraving



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 23:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck Hansen is fifteen years old when he kills his first kaiju.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Icarus

_***_

In another world, Chuck Hansen dies – vaporized in the nuclear blowback that kills the second kaiju, codename: Scissure. He’s standing on the steps of his high school. The nuke wipes him and everything else out of existence and, in a Bell Kiowa just outside the blast zone, Angela Hansen screams away her sanity because her husband – her beautiful, blue-eyed soldier – he came for _her_. Chuck Hansen dies alone, not crying, but afraid because he hears the sirens and he sees the planes and he’s knows before the payload hits because he’s nine years old, but he’s taken high school history and he knows, because he read, about Hiroshima. 

But that world isn’t this world.

In this world, Chuck Hansen is fifteen years old and he’s strapped into a 1,850 ton weapon of the times: the first Mark V Arbiter Tac-Conn 12 Jeager in existence. The inside of his helmet smells faintly metallic, is warm from the relay-gel, smells good. He likes this smell and he breathes in and he breathes out. His heart skips in his chest. Next to him, there is a man in armor very much like his and this man is looking at him. Chuck, however, is not looking at this man because he is running pre-deployment checks and telling LOCCENT that pre-Drift link analysis looks right.

The man on his right says his name.

He ignores the man on his right.

 “Pilots secure,” Chuck says, thumbing the comm and speaking clearly. “Engage drop.”

Chuck Hansen closes his eyes and then he falls.

Falling from the very top of the Shatterdome, is Chuck’s favorite part. There is a boom as the gantry holding the cranial frame disengages, releasing the conn-pod into the drop shaft, hurling down twin rails at speeds that jump Chuck’s heart into his throat and he laughs, once, the comm catching his voice up in the airwaves in LOCCENT but he doesn’t know it. There’s a lurch, like a great elevator stopping, the roar of the conn-pod settling into the cervical assembly.

When he opens his eyes, LOCCENT’s AI is calmly confirming Jaeger hydraulic operations and before him the control assemblies blink, then spawn a series of holo- readouts across his arm, across the HUD over the command consoles arched up from the conn-pod floor and he finally breathes. There is a quiet, a great stillness that is not usual for jaeger deployments, where every moment is critical and every second vital. There is a pause. The man on his right is looking at him. In LOCCENT, all of the Shatterdome listens to him breathe.

“Pilots,” says their dispatch through comm. “Are you prepared for neural handshake?”

The man on his right waits.

“Yes, already,” says Chuck, forgetting operational lingo. “Let’s just get it over with. C’mon.”

The holographic HUD changes, spawns another display, two brains – lit up and linked, a thousand, thousand lines threading them together and Chuck grimaces because he knows what comes next and he’s not ready for it. He’s not ready for this but that doesn’t matter. If he’s scared, it doesn’t matter. If he’s sick, it doesn’t matter. If his hands are shaking and his guts are lead it doesn’t matter. He breathes and in LOCCENT their operator sees his heart-rate spike but she has her orders so she says, “Engaging neural link. In three… two… one…”

Chuck Hansen jerks in his harness, bites his tongue, tastes blood and –

_“Fucking freak,” says the woman on the floor and she is – a woman with a soft gold smile and her face is so goddamn beautiful he still misses – the way the bo-staff cracks across his jaw and teaches him the taste of teeth and his instructors says – “IT’S NOT YOUR DAUGHTER YOU’RE SENDING INTO THE FUCKING FIGHT THOUGH IS IT, STACKER? IT’S NOT YOUR GIRL IT’S MY SON! HOW CAN YOU –“ “–let go of the memories,” his father is saying, softly, with more care than Chuck can remember him ever using. “The Drift is silence –“ and he is running so fast his heart hurts and his muscles are fraying apart like – he’s not going to die because – “Angela would have never forgiven me.”_

Reality is a knife through the nervous system. Chuck opens his eyes and there is no describing the way in which he is lit up, the sensory pathways of his brain glowing white hot, unbearably hot, agonizingly so and he stands there possessed by light electricity like there’s a fist around his heart and in his head and… he’s not Charles Hansen anymore. He’s Hercules Hansen, but he’s not him either, because they are Striker Eureka and they are about to walk the fucking earth. Chuck draws a single ragged breath… then he grins like a goddamn jackal.

“Neural handshake strong and holding,” says LOCCENT. The HUD lights up, the two brains blinking and aligning, overlaid one on top of the other. “Hemisphere alignment?”

“Right hemisphere ready,” says his father.

“Left hemisphere ready,” says Chuck Hansen.

“Your orders,” says their operator, “Are to protect the city of Melbourne.”

“Copy that,” says his father.

“Chuck,” says LOCCENT, breaking standard deployment chatter. He looks up, blinking through the visor of his helmet. “Kick his ass, kid. Come home safe.”

***

Spinejackal is a Category 3. Three thousand tons of metric displacement, swimming like some great alligator through the Pacific Ocean, the massive forest of bone-spines on it back slicing through the surf and leaving a wake half a mile wide behind it. The media helicopters are relaying live coverage of the kaiju’s rapid advancement, the monster moving at forty-five knots, speeding toward the Port of Melbourne where it clearly intends to make landing and tear straight through the heart of the city.

“You ready?”

Chuck doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. He breathes rapidly, tries not to hyperventilate. Striker Eureka marches forward, wading out beyond the harbor, into the artificial archipelago shallows, out as far as the sea-level will allow, so their Jeager is standing waist deep in the ocean, about a mile off shore. Then they wait. Later, a man on a ferry still in Melbourne Harbor will publish a photo he took from the water – Striker Eureka, out beyond the mouth of the harbor, the ocean ignited gold all around him, the great steel titan standing in the sea of sun.

LOCCENT comms in. 

“Striker, target is at one kilometer.”

On TV and emergency radio someone is saying, “Sydney Shatterdome has deployed it’s only operational Jaeger to the atoll beyond the harbor, the prototype Mark V – Striker Eureka. I’m getting reports that the primary is Hercules Hansen. No confirmation if it’s Chuck Hansen in the cockpit with him.” The media helo swivels high overhead, the camera zooming in on the great aggressive frame of the giant, zeroing in on the conn-pod. “Previous deployment records confirm that the Jaeger program’s youngest pilot to date is currently on active duty. The kaiju, codename Spinejackal, is the first Category 3 in Australia's history and reports from the outer archipelago confirm – Nova Hyperion is dead. With no other Jaegers in the area, Striker Eureka’s maiden battle will determine Melbourne’s fate. God speed. God help us all.”

“Point five kilometers.”

They can see it now, the hulking flesh rising out of the ocean, hitting the shallows and breaking the molten gold of the water and the shadow it casts is so long and dark Chuck thinks, for a second, that it’s bleeding black into the sea before it, vomiting up shadows. Chuck feels sick. His fear crackles through them, but Dad doesn’t look at him, doesn’t have to tell him to fucking get his shit together, doesn’t have to say his fear is irrelevant and going to get them killed. He chokes it down and, moving as one with his co-pilot, they assume a defensive stance. 

“Deploying left-hand sting blade,” says Chuck, spreading his fingers and engaging.

Outside, Striker Eureka’s left forearm comes apart and a two-pronged blade the length of a small tanker deploys from its carrier sheath, locking into the place. Chuck lifts his arm, feels the unfathomable tonnage of Striker’s arm move with him.

“Molecular heat systems online. Full burn.”

“Grab and stab,” says Dad, not because he needs to, but because it knows Chuck likes to hear it. “You put that blade through its bloody head. End it. One blow. You got it?”

He’s got it.

Spinejackal is bristling; the great silicon spears jutting from its spine pulse with green bio-light, its long alligator mouth gaping open, the lower jaw peeling apart, splitting up into a thrashing blue maw, hemorrhaging toxic fluid that steams when it hits the water, sending chlorine gas into the air. It stamps, throwing up massive waves, the too-long gorilla arms making it looks like some hideous cross between a bat, a gator, and a hedgehog. It would be almost funny if it hadn’t ripped the guts out of Nova Hyperion on its way here, split her open like a tin can, burned the pilots alive when the power core ignited, lit up the conn-pod like a kiln…

“Focus,” says Dad.

“I don’t like this. Why’s it waiting?”

Striker Eureka edges wary to the left, hands up, like a wrestler on a mat, waiting for his opponent to make a move. Spinejackal tilts its head, drooling poison, watching them. Through the Drift Chuck feels his dad’s anxiety at the predatory intelligence in its stare – _never see one look like that, Yamarashi never did that, none of the Category 2’s –_ and the way it circles. Chuck can tell… it’s looking at the conn-pod and Dad looks at him – _a boy in blue, laughing, six years old –_ and then back at the monster and –

Spinejackal attacks.

It’s fast. It rips across the water, screaming, tearing through the space between them, jaws flared open and Chuck’s heart stops and – _the claws come through the conn-pod, slam through his chest, obliterate the whole of his ribcage in a single thrust and rip him out through the shattered shield visor. It hurls his corpse thirty stories into the golden sea and he is screaming his own name and –_ he freezes.

Dad says “NO! DON’T –!”

But the beast slams into them. The impact is terrible, smashes both pilots back in their harnesses and Chuck feels teeth penetrate his shoulder and _wrench,_ pop his shoulder out of its socketand he _screams_. He knows it’s not his shoulder, it’s not his arm, it’s the Jaeger transmitting across the road work of his nervous system and his arm is a halo of blood-red holo lights. Dad is shouting something. Striker’s right fist slams into a shoulder, snapping several spines, impact popping some of them out the flesh as the base, spraying blood and muscle as they rip free.

The kaiju howls.

As it rears back, releasing Chuck’s shoulder, Striker deploys brass knuckles and Dad’s next swing crushes an eye in its socket. Spinejackal slams back down, grabbing Striker by his massive shoulder guards and like some great jungle cat tries to claw his belly open, knocks Strikers down in the shallows and drives the conn-pod beneath the waves, pins their right arm down. Chuck can’t see, but he can feel the kaiju’s claw scraping down his front, its claws in his shoulders and with enough force to level a building he drives his fist and the whole burning length of Striker’s sting blades through the beast’s ribs and deep into the silicone cavern of its chest.

The water boils blue.

“Grab it!” Chuck’s shoulder is wrenching, Eureka’s shoulder grinding, his nerves burning. “Grab it, old man! I can’t hold it!”

The beast thrashes on top of them, grabs Striker and slams the Jaeger again and against into the bottom of the ocean. It hasn’t really done them too much damage yet but it will. It’s got them on their back and he can feel its claws starting to dig into the pelvic seams where Striker’s legs meet his torso, finding the gaps in the armor. It’s going to kill them if they don’t do something! They are going to die and people are going to die because he fucked up in the Drift.

Spinejackal’s teeth find his shoulder – Striker’s shoulder – again and Chuck screams as everything from his neck to his bicep ignites red. There are spines the length of his finger and thick as his thumb buried in the muscles of his shoulder, into the bone, tearing into him and it _hurts so fucking much._ He hears himself through the Drift, through Dad, hears himself screaming and crying out as this thing chews through his fucking arm while he thrashes like a caught animal in the motion harness.

“DAD, DO SOMETHING!” _It hurts so fucking much._ Emergency systems are coming on. AI control calmly informs them that the left hemisphere operator is going critical, neural alignment at 60%, he’s starting to go into shock and he – _is on the floor, another trainee on top of him, twisting his arm up into his back saying,  “Say it or I’ll break it, freak. Say it!” and he –_ is going to lose consciousness. Teeth sink into him again and he can’t work up the breath to scream. “I can’t …”

– _can’t lose him now. I can’t lose him. He’s the only thing left and – it hurts so fucking much, oh god, please – her smile burning away and the nuclear dust is – breaking his collarbone and crushing his ribs – are so thin through his shirt when he picks his boy up  swings him unto the air while he – screams until his body of gears and guns – are going off  and there is a dead girl in the streets – with blue in her hair, looking at him from across the Kwoon and – if he dies now – then mom died for nothing –_

Striker’s right arm rips free. The Jaeger roars out of the water, grabs the fucking beast by the skull and crushes part of its jaw into the roof of its mouth, shattering its jaw. The sting blade twists free, a gush of blue poisoning the water before the heatblade burns the wound shut and boils the sea around it. The blade steams as it breaks through the water and drives, with meteoric force, through the underside of Spinejackal’s jackal jaw and bursts out the back of its ten ton skull –

_– and the blood running down over his hands is hot, the dead man’s eyes budging in his skull and Private Herc Hansen is – bailed up to his bunk with his PT instructor standing in front of him asking – “How many dead, Hansen?” and the terrible thing is he can’t quite remember – what the answer is because the quantum mechanics of a Plasma-caster are hard to focus on when the girl in the seat next to you is touching your – hand is broken, but he still puts the KA-BAR through the soldier’s eye to the fucking hilt and –_

– pulls the sting blades free. The arc of boiled blood splatters across the water for quarter of a mile around and Chuck slams the blade home through the top of its head again. He does it again. Again. And again, until the ruinous gelatin of its brain is sliding out of the pulverized bone bowl of its skull and he doesn’t care, he just keeps going until there’s nothing left identifiable as a head and then, only then, does he stop. Striker’s hands are blue and his hands are red, gushes of blood pulsing up from dark wet wounds and none of it is his and he –

“Don’t follow it.” Dad’s voice cuts through the Drift. “Don’t. if you follow it I can’t get you out.” _The square root of pie is 1.772453850905…_ “Stay here. Stay with me.” _Primes. The first thousand prime numbers are… two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three…_ “You’re alright.” _…forty-three, forty-seven, fifty-three, fifty-nine…_ “Sixty-one, sixty-seven, seventy-one… breathe.”

He breathes in.

He breathes out.

 

***

He pukes when they disconnect from the Drift. Chuck rips his helmet off and doubles up with his guts knotted and his skull split open. Still latched into his motion harness, he very narrowly avoids vomiting on his own boots. It’s unbelievably pro of him. Chuck unhooks himself from the motion harness, staggers to his knees beneath the control console and pukes bile until he’s dry-heaving, his head bursting pins and needles that won’t stop until Herc Hanson kneels down next to him and puts his hand on the back of his neck. 

“Rack off!

This command is somewhat spoiled by his immediately retching into the floor again. Herc ignores him, drapes an arm over his back and leaves the other hand on the nape of his neck until Chuck is done heaving and he hates himself for being grateful.

“I’m fine.”

“No, yur Drift-sick an’ ghostin’.”

“Said ‘fuck off’…”

“Said ‘no’.”

Chuck groans through his teeth, his fists on the floor so tight the circuitry in his suit is digging into his knuckles but Herc ignores him, just pulls his gloves off and sits with him on the conn-pod floor while Chuck burns off the post-Drift ache, his system humming electromagnetics and sensory ghosts, his brain cleaved in two where, previously, Herc’s mind had been – threaded through his thoughts so completely he forgot he wasn’t the man who killed other men, he wasn’t the one who kissed Angela Hansen and remembers her skin smelled like jasmine. He is none of these things.

He’s throwing up because the neural-load is still a percentage or two too high for a pilot of his size, weight, and neurological patterning. They’d been trying to fix this systems error when Spinejackal came out of the Breach, killed Nova Hyperion, and forced the Hansens to come off their strict non-combat status. Chuck can’t stop shaking.  

“C’mere,” says Herc, “this helps.”

He fits his hand to the other side of Chuck’s head and – more gently than he expects – tugs him slightly to the side, until he’s got his forehead against his temple and he’s right. Something about that relieves the pressure in his skull, just the proximity to his dad sending a low-watt bleed across his skin, soaking through the top of his head into the pulsing ache in the folds and knots of his brain and suddenly he doesn’t feel as sick. It feels so good that, for a minute of childish relief, he lets his dad hold him like he’s a kid.

“You did good.”

“Almost got us killed.”

“Was yur first fight. You did good.”

“No, I fucked it up.” He squeezes his eyes shuts, ignores the burning in the back of them. “They won’t let me pilot her again.”

“That’s idiotic. We scrambled an emergency deploy in the Miracle Mile and we stopped the bastard coming ashore. It didn’t even get into the city. We fuckin’ killed it. How many times do I gotta tell you: You did good.”

“I’m gonna barf on you.”

“You better not.”

He does not barf on his co-pilot. He lets Herc help him to his feet, but he doesn’t let him do anything else even though it physically hurts him to let Herc’s skin leave his. Drift-sick, not quite the same as a Drift-hangover, is when you’re not just neurologically fired up, still ghosting with your co-pilot, it’s when your brain physically cannot handle the separation. The lights in the hangar blind him, cracking his head open again with molten pulses from the back of his eyes to the top of his skull. He forces himself to keep walking, match Herc’s stride as they cross the catwalk from the conn-pod toward the drive suit assembly room.

“This still doesn’t change anything.”

“I know,” says Herc, not looking at him.

The door opens.

Chuck nearly passes out because suddenly every damn drive suit technician in the Sydney Shatterdome is in the assembly room and they are all cheering wildly. Dumbfounded, and quite entirely before he knows what’s happening, Chuck is swept up a sea of hands, patting his back, shoulders, ruffling his hair, a chaotic roar of voices all of them laughing in languages not always his own but all saying, “Great job, kid! You did it! You did it! Amazing!” and “Never seen anything like that! Not in all my days!” and “Killed that fucker dead!” “Chip off the old block!” “Right in the harbor! Stopped it right on th’ bloody doorstep, aye!”

He can’t speak.

Chuck freezes up, but lets the crowd absorb him. At no point is there not someone touching his armor, guiding him by the arm, and in this many-headed organism of humanity his heart begins to slow down. His hands stop shaking. At some point several burlier engineers catch him up by the waist and haul him – drive suit and all – up onto their shoulders and suddenly he’s looking down into a hanger full of people, a hundred glowing faces turned up like solar panels to the sun and he…

“Three cheers for Sydney’s goddamn golden boy!” shouts someone and there aren’t three cheers so much as a single hysterical explosion of admiration and, well, _love_ from this crowd of people most of whom he doesn’t know but many of whom he does and the sheer volume and intensity of what is coming off them has a simultaneous paralyzing and intoxicating effect on him.

Hercules is standing nearby, arms folded, smiling very slightly, ignoring the myriad congratulations in favor of watching his son try desperately to react, settling for sitting, rigid, wide-eyed and looking four years younger than his fifteen years and he doesn’t smile. He just… stares, mouth slightly open on a word he can’t decide on, watching people shout his name over and over and – after a long time, an endlessly long amount of crying and cheering and people radiating emotion like heat, his skin body-warm from contact, his head still aching – Chuck Hansen stops shaking entirely.

He covers his face in his hand drags them back through his hair and he thinks, he thinks: _I did it. Mom, I did it._

Chuck Hansen smiles.

 

 

 

 

_Fin_


End file.
